Questions & Answers

National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward has stared down truth and rendered it on the page with poignance and precision before. But for her third novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing, Ward forged a fresh set of writing tools—historical research, multiple first-person points of view, and a touch of the supernatural—to grapple with the legacy wounds of American racism.

Urgent and evocative, Sing, Unburied, Sing explores the inescapable force of history bearing down on thepresent. Dense, multigenerational tragedy tails 13-year-old Jojo and his drug-addicted mother, Leonie, as they travel from their home in fictional Bois, Mississippi, upstate to retrieve Jojo’s white father from the notorious Parchman Farm, also known as the Mississippi State Penitentiary.

Jojo’s black maternal grandfather, River, also served time in Parchman, and Richie, the ghost of a child prisoner from those cruel years, joins the wretched travel party for the trip’s return leg. In distinct ways, each traveler—young man, woman, and ghost—desperately seeks home in people and places that provide no rest and little shelter.

Margaret Wilkerson Sexton’s grandfather graduated from college and six of his children followed suit. But the next generation struggled to keep pace even as the specter of Jim Crow receded. “I wanted to know why,” she says, and chose fiction as her probe.

The Dartmouth and UC Berkeley Law graduate’s research revealed the war on drugs and mass incarceration as modern barriers to opportunity. Her challenge became illuminating the culprits in narrative form. That is, writing a page-turner, not a sociological treatise. “I wanted it to be a book that also had a plot,” she says. “Because a lot of times I read books and they’re so deep, but it’s like you’re plodding through them.”

In just a year’s time, Sexton found a way to explore the fragility of the black upper class through three generations navigating systemic racism, familial strife, and ill-fated romance. She penned A Kind of Freedomin 2016 during a year-long Djerassi fellowship with novelist Jane Vandenburgh and had a book deal with Counterpoint by early this year.

Ominous and timely, No One Is Coming to Save Us explores the sense of displacement and dispossession that burrows within communities—and individuals—when work vanishes. The novel follows residents of Pinewood, a declining North Carolina factory town, as they ponder the twin perils of staying stuck in the stubborn red clay beneath them or moving earth to cut their own new roads.

Author Stephanie Powell Watts’ story could take place in countless small towns around the country—she points out that Allentown, Pennsylvania, is playing out a similar narrative with the steel industry’s uprooting. But the Lehigh University English professor (and Carolina native) planned from the outset to tell a North Carolina foothills story. She wanted to write with reverence and curiosity about home.

“I’d like for [readers] to think about the characters living in the South, in this post-integrationist era, and think of them just as people that could be their neighbors or their friends. And think of them with grace and charity,” says Watts. “I’d love it if people thought, ‘This is a human story and this could happen.’ ”

It’s tempting to think of Angie Thomas’ YA novel The Hate U Give as being ripped straight from the latest headlines about an unarmed black person shot by the police. But that would miss the point that for many people, Thomas included, the news is not only news: it is lived experience—raw and achingly intimate. And the lives stolen are individual, particular to specific families, neighborhoods, and communities, not generic fodder for hashtags and sound bites.

Thomas says she sometimes has to turn off the television or step away from social media because after a while it feels as if the loss of black lives is mere entertainment or politics. “It’s personal for us,” she says. “We hear politicians and officials debate what’s happened and what’s happening. It’s like, Now really, do you not realize you’re talking about someone’s life here? What about the people who are mourning this?”

Necessary and audacious, Mychal Denzel Smith’s assured debut, Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching, fuses memoir and cultural criticism to ponder an often-neglected question: How did you learn to be a black man?

His answers are compelling. Even more, the way he scrutinizes the origin of his beliefs about black identity and masculinity is revelatory–and instructive. He mines his personal history as an Obama-era black millennial in the service of a larger vision: social transformation through personal awakening.

I interviewed bestselling author Zadie Smith live before a sold out crowd at Central Presbyterian Church in Austin on January 12th at 7 p.m. It was an honor to chat with Smith about her writing process and latest product–Swing Time.

In The Firebrand and the First Lady, scholar Patricia Bell-Scott illuminates the unlikely friendship between two historic American women. Radical civil and women’s rights activist Pauli Murray and first lady Eleanor Roosevelt corresponded for years and swayed one another’s social justice aims and strategies. Their views never converged, but Bell-Scott makes a compelling case that they grew with and toward each other.

“I started out being interested primarily in doing a biography, but then the friendship just drew me in,” Bell-Scott says of her decadeslong quest to capture the relationship and its impact—both on the women and the country.

Murray saw Roosevelt for the first time in 1934 at Camp Tera, a government-sponsored facility for unemployed women. Murray was an indigent resident, and Roosevelt was the camp’s visionary, visiting to confer with residents and ensure the camp was adequately staffed, equipped, and integrated. Twenty-four-years old, malnourished, and suffering from respiratory problems, Murray was exactly the kind of young woman Roosevelt meant the New Deal camp to serve.

26-year-old Brit Bennett’s sparkling debut novel, The Mothers, came of age over eight years and several drafts. She began penning the tale of youthful indiscretions and betrayals while just a teen. Then she carried it with her through college at Stanford and to MFA and postgraduate fellowship programs at the University of Michigan, where she torched and remade the story repeatedly.

The pull of the characters and drama at Upper Room Chapel, a black church in a California beach town, kept her honing the novel despite the gap between her literary ambitions and nascent writing skills. “I felt a type of loyalty to these characters because I had grown up alongside them,” she says. “It’s this crazy leap of faith that someday this book that was so bad for so long would get better. I’m glad I stuck with it and believed there was a good story there somewhere. I just had to learn how to develop the skills in order to tell it.”

A powerful new anthology aims to channel the spirit of James Baldwin’s sharp eye and sharper pen, turning them on current events from Trayvon Martin to Sandra Bland. In The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race, Jesmyn Ward has collected 18 essays and poems by contemporary authors that bring Baldwin’s tradition to the present day.

Ward says she saw glimpses of acuity like Baldwin’s in social media posts but longed to bottle it up. “There were so many writers on Twitter who had such great ideas and really insightful things to say about what was happening,” she recalls. “Then after two days I didn’t have access to those ideas anymore just because of the way that particular social media platform is structured. I wondered where I could go in order to encounter that kind of thoughtfulness about race in America.”

Ward found that Baldwin’s words, despite the passage of time, still directly addressed much of what she was experiencing in the present. “He’s such a singular voice,” she explains. “I find myself turning to his work again and again…and I’m continuously surprised at his bravery and his fierceness.”

Kaitlyn Greenidge knows that her debut novel, We Love You, Charlie Freeman, is a disorienting read. She spent eight years grappling with how to render its vexing premise with nuance and substance. Her account of a black family hired by a research institute to raise a chimpanzee as their own is as wild as you would expect and more thought-provoking.

“Every couple of days when working on this, up until the end, I doubted whether or not this was a good idea, whether people will understand what I am trying to explore, and whether it will be taken seriously,” Greenidge says. Her perseverance paid off, leaving us with a strange but powerful debut novel that charms as it prompts reflection.

Hey There!

I’m Maya Payne Smart, a book lover and reviewer. I split my time between speed reading and slow writing, usually about dynamic women who lift as they climb. My specialty? Delivering life-changing reads to world-changing women.